True or not, the acts that Childs spoke of happened 12 to 13 years ago, well beyond Georgia’s seven-year statute of limitations, Roundtree said.

“It was not prosecutable,’’ Roundtree said, but police scrambled, conducted other interviews and developed evidence of more recent acts that enabled them to secure felony warrants.

Roundtree said Childs wasn’t even asking that anyone be arrested, that he just wanted his story on the record with somebody just in case.

Childs laid out much of it for the Times-Union Thursday, saying only he didn’t want to go into graphic detail about sex acts. The Times-Union doesn’t usually name people who report being victims of sexual assault. He said he wanted to be named because he said it was part of the healing process.

It started with Wednesday night youth group meetings with Clark at Loganville United Methodist Church in 2000, Childs said. Although now divorced, his parents, Susan and Dan Childs were happily raising two sons, Chris and his older brother, so it’s not as if there was a missing father figure, he said.

“He was a bigger brother and a best friend,’’ Childs said of Clark. “He referred to me and others as little brother.”

In September of 2000, after a youth trip to Cumberland Island chaperoned by parents, Childs, then 13, decided on the drive home he would start taking drum lessons from Clark.

“I saw him on Wednesdays for youth, drum lessons on Thursdays,’’ Childs said.

Clark had played in the University of Georgia Redcoat Band and told his students he could get them in the band if they decided to go to UGa, Childs said.

About two months after the drum lessons started, the sex acts followed, Childs said.

“I stayed over at his house one night,’ he said. “We were getting up early to go to a UGa game or something. I slept in his bed. He made moves on me that night.”

So where were the parents?

They were right there, asking questions but their son wasn’t telling them everything, said his mother Susan, who works as a nurse.

“We noticed a personality change in Chris. He was being defiant to us,’’ she said.

They put Chris on restriction, told him he could go to youth meetings on Wednesday but insisted the drum lessons had to be in their home, Susan Childs said.

“It was a hard situation,’’ she said. Unlike his older brother, who played sports and was involved in other activities, Chris didn’t have many interests.

“Ray was good for Chris,’’ Susan Childs said.

“Seemingly,’’ her son added.

“Ray gave him a sense of purpose,’’ she said.

Chris said he built up resentment at this parents over those restrictions.

“It felt like they were taking away my best friend,’’ he said.

And in private, Clark was validating those feelings, he said.

“He said it was all healthy. It was a unique relationship nobody else understood,’’ Childs said.

Clark was also boosting his own status.

“All the while ... he’s getting his Masters degree in theology at Emory so there are even more reasons to trust him. He’s a man of God,’’ Childs said. “He started saying, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with your parents.’’’

Childs said there were about 90 days with no sexual contact. At one point, Clark even joined his parents in an intervention of sorts when Childs began wearing black and had befriended some pot-smoking Goths.

It wasn’t long before he was again taking trips with Clark to concerts and other events.

Then a couple of things happened.

As he went to band camps before high school started, he met another band director.

“I saw what a real professional band director looked like. He wasn’t a line-stepper,’’ Childs said.

And in high school, he got a girlfriend, Childs said.

He was tired of Clark’s “neediness,’’ said he felt smothered. He and Clark had planned to go UGa alumni weekend that fall where he was eager to meet Clark’s old friends and watch him march onto the football field.

“I decided to hang out with my girlfriend instead, and I didn’t let him know,’’ Childs said.

Clark was incensed and made that old threat, Childs said.

“He said, ‘I’ll make sure you never get in the Redcoat Band,’’’ Childs said. “At that point I didn’t care.”

Asked when it happened, Childs puzzled it over, but his mother consulted her notes from long ago and said it was around Oct. 28, 2001. She called Clark.

Clark asked her to not go to the church yet, to wait until she and her husband calmed down and thought it over.

But go to the church they did and laid out to the Staff/Parish Relations Committee how they believed Clark had manipulated their son and driven a wedge into their family. The church did nothing, Susan Childs said, adding “That was the last time I set foot in that church.”

The church office wasn’t opened late Thursday to reach someone for comment.

There was an important element, however, missing from the meeting with church officials. Childs still hadn’t told his parents about the sex acts.

But Childs said the committee “not once” asked about whether there had been any inappropriate relationships between him and the church youth minister.

When his mother asked, he acknowledges that he denied it with “not really,” but says it was evasive.

“I didn’t come forward with the sexual part until [last] November. I was ashamed and guilty,’’ he said. “I wish I had had the courage to come forward then.

Chris Childs lives in Atlanta now and plays percussion with a couple of bands, Hello Ocho and Fawn and a Pan Flute, often playing “experimental music.”

That first girlfriend didn’t last long, but he has had relationships with other women and said he hasn’t been scarred for life.

He has been in Southeast Georgia this week talking with law enforcement and, his mother has been with him. “The main objective is to let kids know you don’t have to hide this,’’ he said.